What are the cultural implications of living under conditions of global, manufactured risk?

In the twentieth century, the possibility arose for the first time that a crisis of planetary proportions might result from human activities. By the early decades of the century, global economic and financial interdependence was such that a crisis unfolding in one location could radiate outwards to destabilize the entire socio-economic world-system. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the risk of pandemic upheaval has been heightened by an array of phenomena: the expansion and acceleration of media and telecommunications networks; the integration of financial markets and the instantaneous ramification of market fluctuations via programme trading; nuclear proliferation; international terrorism; rapid population growth; unsustainable consumption of natural resources; overload of electricity grids, leading to cascading power failures; pollution of the ecosphere and resulting climate change; computer viruses and ‘cyber-warfare’; genetic engineering; cloning; nanotechnology; artificial intelligence; bioweaponry; the emergence and rapid spread of new strains of infectious disease; and the development of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Such occurrences hover indeterminably somewhere between the possible, the probable, and the inevitable. This conference will explore how writers, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, philosophers, and critical and cultural theorists have responded to the prospect and reality of global crisis. Moreover, it will ask how the methodologies of textual and cultural criticism might offer new insights into our age of global risk.

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

Notions of futurity, messianism, and the à venir (‘to come’)

Modernism and the first era of globalization

Figurations of the contemporary, postmodern, or technological sublime

The alteration and/or realization of textual meanings in the wake of catastrophic events

Connections between conditions of global risk and the aesthetic or intellectual ‘risks’ taken by experimental artists and thinkers

Disaster films

Ecocriticism and climate change

Future ruins

The fate of the archive

‘Nuclear Criticism’ and its possible revival post-9/11

(Post-)apocalyptic visions

Cyberculture and utopian/dystopian futures

The cultural implications of Kondratiev waves and world-systems theory

For further information, please contact the conference organizer, Dr Paul Crosthwaite, at globalrisk@cf.ac.uk.